All skiers know about the chairlift that whips riders from the summit to the slopes, but few would ever consider it as a form of urban mass transit. In fact, in cities throughout the world, the urban gondola is an important part of the transportation mix and its popularity is on the rise.

New York City has a gondola–the Roosevelt Island Tram–which makes 115 trips daily, and has carried more than 26 million passengers between Midtown Manhattan and Roosevelt Island. Clearly gondolas are not just a tourist attraction.

Steven Dale is a transportation consultant and founder of The Gondola Project, a clearinghouse of information about global use of gondolas. Beginning on Nov. 1, 2009, Dale committed himself to writing a column per day about cable-powered transportation systems across the world, as well as best practices. Dale also seeks to demystify aerial cable cars and facilitate a discussion about urban mass transit beyond the three traditional modes: bus, light rail and subway. Today is day 286.

AltTransport: How did you first get into gondolas?

Steven Dale of the Gondola Project

Steven Dale: To be perfectly honest, it was purely by accident. I did my post-grad studies in urban planning. My girlfriend is Swiss and she suggested, “why don’t we visit Switzerland for the summer?” I had never been there. She said we were going to go hiking on one of the mountains and we were going to take a gondola.

I had no idea what a gondola was. In the particular area that we were in, these things were old and rickety and probably 40-years-old. I honestly looked at it and thought, “Is this thing safe?”

We hopped in it, and there was just this moment when the route of the gondola passed over a service road, and a truck went under us at the moment that we crossed. And there was this instant when I wen,t “Oh. Of course, there’s no traffic when you’re 25 feet in the air.”

What happened after your “aha!” momnet?

Basically I started to do some independent research–very hush hush, ya know because I thought the idea was totally ridiculous. I just didn’t tell anyone. I Began to discover that the numbers actually worked. Much to my surprise.

After that I got picked up by the Canadian Urban Institute and they commissioned some research from me on that. Then I began working with the industry and then I started working with NGOs and universities. And now the private sector and government is beginning to talk to us and ask us for advice and counseling.

What is the purpose driving the website?

One of the things that initially sparked the website is that it’s remarkably hard to find reliable numbers out there on this topic. It’s such a niche area that really there is no central repository of information. None of the research that was out there had been digitized.

No one had done field studies. I thought the easiest way to make to make this accessible was to put up a website for people that brought all those things together in one place.

Medellin MetroCable photo by Chikodi Chima

In government policy and research, we like to say garbage in, garbage out.
Basically, if you had bad numbers and ideas at the beginning, those numbers are going to propagate.

I can tell you quite certainly that there are several cities that I talk to–and while they are truly excited by it and they want to pursue it–they don’t want anybody to know they’re even pursuing it, because they don’t want to look insane.

I understand it, especially when you look at how politicized transit planning is these days. I’m not sure we necessarily leave transportation planning to the people who should be doing it, or necessarily to the public.

If someone is going into an election, the last thing they want to look like is the ski lift candidate.

Where are the best examples of gondola projects and what cities are good case studies?

Every city is different. One of the things I try to say is that this can go everywhere and nowhere. It’s not until you look at the place and apply it. In my home town of Toronto we have an extensive ravine system that you’re not allowed to put any development in except infrastructure. This would be an ideal location to apply a technology like this.

Other places would be these suburban corridors we’ve built over the last 50 years, you know eight-lane wide boulevards, with a traffic median in the middle. That’s really the perfect place to implement it.

What I really try to recommend to people is don’t fly over people’s back yards. If you’re having a barbecue with your friends and family, you’re not going to want what is in essence a bus in the air in your back yard.

: What cities are successfully implementing gondola systems?

South America is really the place for it. Medellin, Colombia has built three lines. That first line was built for $25 million, all in. If you consider that they built a 2-kilometer, four-station system that can move 3,000 people per direction per hour and they did that all in for $25 million. Meanwhile, you have Seattle’s light rail, that came in at $120 million per kilometer and it moves 2,000 people per hour per direction.

So how does light rail compare to gondola in terms of cost and performance?

Light rail has really gotten a free ride in a lot of ways. It’s situated between a technology we don’t like–buses–and a technology we can’t afford– which are subways.

Really when you think about it there are only three technologies we talk about: bus, streetcar/light rail and subways. Right now the trend is towards medium capacity, medium cost systems. So light rail has had it pretty easy because no one is building subways.

What is a rough estimate of the cost difference between a well-planned gondola system could cost relative to light rail.

I tend to do is to try to assume an apples to apples thing. So if you were going to build a light system in a city, versus a gondola system for the same city, you have assume they have the same labor force, the same civic costs, the same labor costs, the same consultants cost.

Generally, what we see–and this is a very general ballpark–gondolas come out to 1/3 to 2/3 of the cost of light rail while providing a similar if not better level of service. In every kind of transit planning, there is almost no way to say this is what it’s going to cost.

What is the most important thing people need to know about gondola systems?

One thing I’ve found that people do in transit advocacy is “my technology is the best,” to the exclusion of all others. That goes for bus rapid transit, that goes for PRT (personal rapid transit), that goes for LRT (light rail,) it goes for all of them. One of the things I’ve been very happy about with The Gondola Project and the sort of people that have been part of the community is that we’re not saying “cable is the best.” What we’re saying is that it’s one of many options you have. And while you’re exploring your options, you might be surprised by what it can do for you and your community.

Images: Theilr/Flickr, Phillie Casablanca/Flickr, Borkur.net/Flickr